The Great Wide Empty Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

Your home is planted six feet down
in a casket of monarch blue.
A light sky crepe supports your crown
to give comfort and peace to you.
Flowers impart their folded breath.
A flood of reckon fills the eyes;
and through your death, I see my death.
This fatal skin its senses rise.

Empty frames embody a void,
echoes lost in a wordless cry.
A pantheon for Sigmund Freud,
bright stars are falling from the sky.
The universe is cracked in half.
The dimming darkness looms above.
A carved headstone and epitaph
are tributes to the one thereof.

Pictures not taken - going, gone.
Moments lived are once and only.
It falls apart, so on and on,
unremembered, lost and lonely.
Aching to fill the holes with light,
we lick lightning's radiant rod
in Faustian realms of dark night
bursting wide on the lips of God.

The great wide empty heart of man
sheds shadows in darkened places
proffering what little it can
like children with dirty faces.
A hand out is a hand in need.
A lock is latched upon the door.
Bleeding out, we forget to bleed.
Instincts harden forevermore.

You lay within earth's deep, dark keep
sculpting time with fingers of bone.
These are the truths we all shall reap
in a wasteland of stele stone.
The later years are maudlin years,
whittled thin as a winding sheet.
Redemptive tears are final tears
with martyred dreams beneath our feet.

I know the night is overdue.
There is a point of no return.
The flow of life from me to you
no bloody ghost can overturn.
The heart shall pen its final beat
in brittle veins of paper skin
in ode to life lived incomplete -
the great wide empty born within.